Even the most Astute Reader, however, may not quite have a handle on what exactly it is that I do. "Where, Mr Hardman, is your real value?", the Astute Reader may ask, and rightly so. The Astute Reader may even have done enough research to be able to say "Mr Hardman, you don't even have a Microsoft(tm) Certified Software Engineer certificate, obviously you cannot be 'all that'." But with apologies to the Tao Te Ching, "the Astute Reader that thinks you need to be an MCSE to work in IT, is not the True Astute Reader."
Information, and technology, are far larger fields than can be encompassed in an MCSE, or even an "A-Plus" certificate. Even with the best degree from the best university -- which for this subject would be the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- one can't possibly grasp the entirety of Information Technology.
And this might be exactly where Mr Hardman's true value lies: I don't even try to understand all of that. I'll leave that up to the hardcore engineers and academics.
What do I do that makes me interesting enough for a few people to read this blog, or anything else I might write?
More or less, I ask the same sort of questions as do the Elders of the Old Order Amish.
A lot of people seem to think that the Amish categorically reject all technology. This isn't the case; they just don't let it take over their lives and separate them from their community.
For example, there was quite a debate over cellphones.
Now, I am not Amish. Yet there's no doubt at all that some of my maternal ancestors came from about the same places at the same time on the same ships as did some Amish people. My mother was born in Lebanon, PA, heart of the Amish country. However, she was raised as a Lutheran, she says, not as Amish. Yet it was unavoidable that the affairs of the Amish were observed in the rest of the community, and the affairs of the rest of the community were observed by the Amish.
It seems that at one point in time, there was some sort of furious debate over whether or not it was proper to use this new-fangled invention called the rotary cream separator.
Before this invention, you separated cream from the rest of the milk by letting it rise to the top, a somewhat long process. With the new cream separator, instead of doing something else while waiting for the natural separation, you could get your cream separated right away. Then you could go do whatever needed doing.
Evidently this caused quite a furor, to the point where it seems that some of the congregation declared a separation from the others. My dad used to claim that this was where Mennonites came from, in that they were basically Amish that got fed up with doing absolutely everything only ever the old-fashioned way, but we could never tell whether or not he was just displaying his "German sense of humor" or didn't know whereof he spoke.
Such separations of congregations are actually fairly common, one such occurred in the early 20th Century over the issue of telephones. Finally, the matter was settled by allowing a "telephone shack" in the community, set aside from and outside of the house. Yet, it appears, not even the Amish are immune to the appeal of a mobile telecommunications lifestyle. Increasing numbers of Amish do indeed carry cellphones.
But, one has to wonder -- and I did indeed digress -- whether or not any given Amish might even suspect that they had become a "SPIME"?
This is one of the things Mr Hardman does: he keeps track of this sort of thing.
A "spime" is a neologism, a new word for a new concept, or a new word that summarizes a confluence of phenomena.
The credit for the word goes to the most-excellent science-fiction writer and technology pundit Bruce Sterling. I must recommend any of his fiction and non-fiction to anyone who has the slightest curiousity about where it seems some of our technological advances may be taking us.
First, though, you might want to fully read his article, When Blobjects Rule the Earth, a presentation from SIGGRAPH 2004.
... A Gizmo is the classic form of our society's material culture at this point in time.
That's how it is, and we need to accept that. This is the apotheosis, the crystallization, of what we are up to right now. But that is not the end of the story. Because the next stage is coming on fast.
The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a "Wrangler." At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.
The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.
Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.
They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.
Mr Sterling, many would suggest, is just nuts. But he's not. If you are carrying a modern cellphone, you are pretty much carrying a Spime.
In another recent article, a far different author with rather different focus remarks on Spime Networks and the future of Intelligence Collection.
Mr Roderick Jones notes:
... The basic idea surrounding the ‘internet of things’ is that all things become nodes in a global network and to some degree act autonomously or to put it another way, “Our washing machines can ask for soap". This new or developing network creates a new category of object, known as a Spime [SPace +tIME] - a phrase coined by the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. A Spime was defined by David Orban as an object with memory, computing capacity, location awareness and sensors. These Spimes already exist just not yet to scale. The leading driver of spime networks was initially thought to be RFID tags but actually it is smart phones that are providing the most compelling current platform. A great example of one such, spime is an application developed for the iphone by WideTag - called WideNoise. This uses the iphone to collect decibel readings posting them to a map to determine where the quieter areas in the world are. ...
Back in 1996, I copyrighted a novel set "in the near future" and proposed something I called "beltcoms".
If you're using an iPhone, or any of another of the "new generation smartphones", you are using a beltcom, more or less. That's "belt-wearable computer and communications device".
Back in 1994 or 1995 or so when I was cooking up the concept -- remember, I used to work for the Federal Communications Commission, Common Carrier Land Mobile division, which licenses spectrum to pagers and cellphones -- I tried to talk to some people about the concept.
They all thought I was nuts.
And I can text them a mail on the subject to them and they're going to twitter right back on their blackberries, and they'll tell me that they still think I'm nuts.
Heck, a psychiatrist who interviewed me back in 1994 or so as part of my disability award hearing thought I was nuts, too. All he had to do was to check with the Homeless Outreach center and ask them about me.
It seems that I kept going on and on about something to do with "going online with computers" and "modems" and other crazy stuff like that. I believe the clincher was my idea to use a computer at the Homeless center to dial up to the nearby University of Texas (Austin) jobs center, or even the Texas Employment Commission, and to "download" -- whatever that meant to my delusional worldview -- the day's job-openings postings. It seems that I thought this would save time and money and a one-hour round-trip bus-ride.
There was no question that I was out of my mind. I got a disability award, and not-incidentally, a prescription for thyroid medication, which did a lot of good in terms of helping me to think straight not not exhibit all of the symptoms of profound clinical depression.
A year later, I was online at a "UNIX host in Takoma Washington, getting in one the ground floor of the InterNet...
That was 1995, and I was watching all of my delusions becoming very very real all around me, including my delusion of downloadable job listings.
By 1996, when I copyrighted my second science-fiction novel, cellphones were mostly used by business people, and were fairly large. The idea of a "beltcom" seemed to most people to be pretty delusional.
Now they are so ubiquitous -- and so pervasively invasive into all aspects of our lives -- that a Federal ban is on the way which would prohibit Texting While Driving.
It happens all of the time, and makes people two dozen times more likely to get into a wreck.
Not even I am delusional enough to text while driving... but I see cops doing it all of the time.
The idea of using "citizens as sensors" is as old as snitching, but is the idea of using citizen-carried autonomous automation running on cellphones to automatically snitch just another delusion from just another delusional?
Ushahidi does not think so.
The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.
From the BBC World:
Post-election unrest in Kenya has been widespread and hard to monitor in real time. Some concerned bloggers are trying to help. They've set up a website where Kenyans can report on what they see in their own communities. The result: a real-time, web-based map that shows what's happening all across Kenya. ...
Back to the posting from the Counterterrorism Blog,
... Taking as a start point the success that the Ushahidi project had in tracking both Kenyan post election violence and war-time activity in the Gaza strip we speculated on what an autonomous app might look like, which ran on a smart phone applying a similar theme. Using the idea of unique sound signatures our app, in its first iteration, ‘listened’ for sounds to report them back to a central database. Sounds such as gunfire, military vehicle movement or even militia on horseback provide a unique signature, which could then be used to provide a much richer intelligence picture of events on the ground. Over time other sensors could be layered into the app to monitor the environment for chemical or biological agents or to provide rapid analysis of images. As a system we conceived of this as an open environment. ...
Most people are at least marginally aware that their iPhone has a built-in GPS (global positioning system). Some people bought it specifically because of the ease of running applications that interpret or enhance the basic and federally-mandated GPS features. But are most people even slightly cognizant of the fact that the iPhone has a position sensor inside it that can tell the physical orientation of the unit to within a few tenths of a degree?
Most modern "beltcoms" (or cellphones or smartphones or crackberries, whatever) have a variety of networking modes. All, of course, have cellphone connectivity; most also have "bluetooth" personal-area networking capability, both for file and list transfers, and usually also for hands-free operations. Many also have WiFi connectivity. Some even have the ability to use Voice-over-Internet-Protocols (VoIP) via WiFi as an altenative to connecting to the provider cellular network.
It's arguable that before too long, some or most (or even all) beltcoms will have RFID ("radio-frequency ID") scanner capability, as well.
That would certainly help develop an "internet of Things".
It's arguable that any beltcom/cellphone/crackberry with both cellular and bluetooth transceivers already has the radio-frequency gear onboard, but doesn't yet have the software to interpret return emissions from RFID chips. That could change with one system-software update.
It might get even more interesting if your beltcom could talk to your car.
Some years ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set out standards for vehicle EDR, or "electronic data recorders".
In an article from the September 24, 2008, Auto Week, author Bob Gritzinger gives some cautionary information in his article
Black box on board:New standards for automotive big brother take effect in 2012:
Wired into airbag sensors, yaw and stability sensors, antilock brake and traction controllers, electronic throttle controls and engine monitors, EDRs soon will collect a bewildering amount of data in keeping with pending federal regulations aimed at standardizing information available from the devices. Those regulations, finalized earlier this year and set to go into effect Sept. 1, 2012 (on 2013-model-year vehicles), specify exactly how much and what types of information must be collected and saved electronically in the event of a crash or airbag deployment.
Further,
... Jim Baxter, president of the watchdog National Motorists Association, noted that this does nothing to constrain law-enforcement accident investigators, private eyes and other interested parties-such as manufacturers and insurance companies-from getting a court order to download the information.
"NHTSA did issue a rule that the units must generate specific information," Baxter said, "but that doesn't prevent them from collecting more information. There's pretty much no limit on what they can collect."
Baxter said his group's efforts to push federal legislation to protect motorists against EDRs fell on deaf ears, especially now, with Americans more than willing to give up privacy in favor of safety after Sept. 11, 2001. "The general mentality is, 'If I get some benefit, here's my information,'" Baxter said. "Obviously, some quarters object, but I don't see widespread resistance to it."
Baxter said he believes objections won't grow until tiny RFIDs--radio frequency identification devices--are more prevalent and are used by private or public entities to monitor individual travel. RFIDs could theoretically allow a parent to track a teen, an insurer to watch for high-risk driving or law-enforcement officials to track a person driving from point A to point B, compute the speed and issue a speeding ticket without so much as starting a patrol car or turning on a radar gun.
"When people can't go down to the grocery store without getting a citation, then we'll see a reaction," Baxter predicted. ...
The Astute Reader will, of course, remember a flap a year or so ago, about how one Jeroen van Beek was able to hack RFID chips embedded in US passports.
The Astute Reader will also understand that the current series is all about a crying need to update the state of the laws, and the laws of the State, to recognize emerging technologies and trends in technology.
For example, right now it is not -- so far as I know -- illegal to run an app on your beltcom that will hack a neighboring device via bluetooth, force it into a system update to download an RFID scanning interpreter software package, and thereafter to access and store (or upload) vehicle EDR information as well.
And with all of this, RFID scanning, EDR access, and GPS with a variation upon Ushahidi, anyone or everyone could know not only when you drove to the store, but also the route you took, the way you drove, the driving conditions, and the RFID data for every product you bought and loaded into the cabin of the vehicle.
And as mentioned before, insofar as I can tell, there is no Maryland law prohibiting any part at all of this.
More to come?
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